The Alliance & Leicester has become the latest casualty of the dotcom banking craze. Having spent £15 million on an online financial service for the "mass affluent", it's decided to ditch the scheme. The FT quotes A&L group MD, Peter McNamara, as saying that "we've learnt the lessons of others". Bloody expensive lesson, no?

Both le Freeserve and Wanadoo suffered at the stock exchange (London and Paris, respectively) yesterday. Freeswerve put a brave face on its results - highlighting that operating loss was lower than last quarter but glossing over the fact that pre-tax losses had rocketed - but shares still fell 3.6 per cent.

NEC senior VP Kazuhiko Kobayashi didn't win himself any friends in the open source community when he recently claimed that, to all intents and purposes, Linux hasn't a hope of catching up with Windows in key corporate-oriented applications.

Forget Jim Carrey - Saddam Hussein is the real Grinch who stole Christmas - at least according to one Web site. It claims the Iraqi dictator is buying up the world's supply - such as it is - of PlayStation 2 consoles to build military supercomputers.

Crackers are using viruses to get their malicious code into corporate Intranets, according to Marc Blanchard, technical director at Trend Micro. This means antivirus companies will have to start working on ways to combat this code, as well as the viruses they are used to tackling.

Warner Brothers' intimidation of the owners of Harry Potter-named Web sites continues. Not only is the harrypotterguide.co.uk situation still going on but several other owners have been in touch to relay their anger over how they've been treated.

The FBI's notorious Internet traffic sniffer Carnivore includes a handy, idiot-proof GUI interface enabling nosey Feds to capture and examine a broad range of what passes through, from headers alone to full-bore content retrieval, which is pictured in the Justice Department's final assessment from the IIT Research Institute and the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law (IITRI).